Projection is not only a defense mechanism where we rationalize the world by identifying behavior of others as being motivated by what motivates us, say trauma or abuse. It’s also how marketing works. When you do it deliberately, it’s called “advertisting” or “business development” or “advertainment” or whatever the tech news calls itself these days.
However, even when it’s done deliberately, the mechanism that fuels the intention and the enthusiasm for an idea still comes from somewhere in your brain that not easily understood, and is desperately hungry, all the time. Your id breaks through and tells us what’s really going on, and you don’t know it because you think just because you’re using your rational brain – you know, to make an ad campaign for a smart speaker for children that supposedly avoids the problems of surveillance capitalism by having no mic, no camera, etc – you don’t know you’re telling on yourself.
The Yoto smart speaker is a device that connects to the cloud to deliver content to pre-verbal children. “No cam. No mic. No funny business,” is an interesting claim if you believe they’re projecting what they believe when they’re asking you to believe something about them. What funny business do you mean? Are you saying it’s a completely offline device that delivers new content without having to purchase cartridges or tapes or cds? Because that’s awesome.
In fact, I had one myself and I loved it. It trained me to handle and fetishize my parents objects so I could learn to consume them, but that’s cool. I like music.
No, Yoto just wants to collect, store and monitor your child’s behavioral data, just like everyone else. “Parents can also upload content they select (say, songs from a playlist, or a certain audio book) to blank cards using a parent app; the cards work using NFC technology, like a contactless credit card, that link to content stored on Yoto’s servers.”
Probably sell it too, since many companies who do the former do the latter; some only do it to enable the latter. But we haven’t even looked up the founders of the company yet.
Elizabeth Bodiford has a nice way of describing this kind of behavior in her poem, We Tell On Ourselves:
We tell on ourselves by the way that we walk.
Even by the things of which we talk.